General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.

In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I'll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.

Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)

Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)

Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!

Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as "cheering news".(1075403821)

Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn't matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)

Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to '"contain" the putative Medieval Warm Period'. (1054736277)

Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)

Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it's insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre's sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many "good" scientists condemn it.(1254756944)

Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)

Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)

Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be "hiding behind them".(1106338806)

Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to "get rid of the Medieval Warm Period". Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)

Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)

Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)

Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the "increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage" he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)

Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman's admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)

Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)

Reaction to McIntyre's 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper's editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers - Saiers was subsequently ousted]

Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)

Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)

Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn't be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don't want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)

Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of "apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data". [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)

Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)

Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)

Funkhouser says he's pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn't think it's productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)

Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)

Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)

Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)

Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)

David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn't be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)

Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)

Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr "I'm not entirely there in the head" will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)

Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)

Phil Jones having problems with explaining issues over the Lamb image of global temps in the early IPCC reports. Says it shouldn't be discussed openly at Real Climate. Says better left buried.(1168356704)

Phil Jones emails Steve [Schneider], editor of Climatic Change [plus others, editorial board of the journal?], telling him he shouldn't accede to McIntyre's request for Mann's computer code. In later email to Mann ("For your eyes only, delete after reading") Jones says he told Jones separately [presumably meaning without saying to the rest of the board] that he should seek advice elsewhere and also consult the publisher and take legal advice.(1074277559)

Briffa says he tried hard to balance the needs of the IPCC and science, which were not always the same.(1177890796)

An anonymous source says that robustness problems with the Hockey Stick are known to anyone who understands his methodology. The source says that there will be a lot of noise over McIntyre's 2003 paper and that knowing Mann'svery thin skin he will react strongly, unless he has learned from the past.(1067194064)

Giorgio Filippo (University of Trieste) says that IPCC is not an assessment of published science but about production of results. Says there are very few rules and anything goes. Thinks this will undermine IPCC credibility. Says everyone seems to think it's OK to do this.(0968705882)

IPCC review editor John Mitchell says that the issue of why proxy data for recent decades is not shown (he says it's because they don't show warming) needs to be explained. [Note to readers, this was not done Let's say that the explanation was nuanced - it said that the divergence problem, as this issue is known, was restricted to a few areas]. Also says that Mann's short-centred PC analysis is wrong and that Mann's results are not statistically significant.(1150923423)

If you want to see how different the world now is from how it was before the internet, look no further than this story (now bouncing energetically around the world): It is claimed that the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been hacked and there is a ...

A. W. Montford posts a great list of 33 of the more outrageous emails from the Climatic Research Institute over at Bishop Hill Blog. Here are the first ten: Climate cuttings 33Welcome Instapundit readers! Hope this is useful for you....

The "hacked" (or maybe released by some insider) e-mails and files of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia make intoxicating reading. As a minor member of the crowd which has been saying for years that fishy stuff is going on, the schadenfreude is just yummy. A ...

From the Bishop Hill summary - "Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!" Plus: "....how a crude fax from Jack Eddy became the...

For those of you who don’t know of the blog Bishop Hill, let me say that he is a succinct and careful writer who has earned praise from many (including myself and Steve McIntyre) in taking a difficult niche subject such as the Hockey Stick and paleo

John Gormley Live and SDA - doing the job the CBC won't do! Welcome JGL listeners: some links to bring you up to speed. Because if you've been relying on your trusty network newsguys to deliver the goods, you're being...

Well, it finally happened. Much of Canadian media broke radio silence on Climategate today. There really wasn't much choice but to report it, now that Environment Minister Jim Prentice had officially described the allegations as "serious", coupled with the day-old...

Sorry, don't have the number, but Wigley criticizes an activist group sending out a letter to scientists, asking them to sign that it is imperative we act now.

Wigley points out how that is not supported by the science, as it is poorer countries and poorer people in rich countries that bear the brunt of mitigation policy, and that the difference between a go slow sooner and go fast approach are minimal.

You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we've found a way around this.

Bishop, thanks a lot for your overview in these caotic moments. Seems there is a major earthquake in the blogosphere, and it's leaking into the main street media. These latter seems to be deaf and blind when it comes to "climate change" - but what true "bloodhound" journalist can resist a true scandal?

The hockeystick affair, the Yamal implosion, the CRUgate - how much will it actually take? I mean, to make people see that the "climate crisis" is not settled at all. One can only wonder, but sure these are interesting days.

I would say that Trenbarth comes out of this looking like the lone scientist and critical thinker among propagandists. He gives good argument in private but tows the party line, or at least keeps his mouth shut, in public.

I have a high opinion of him as a result of these emails.

These emails are very damaging to Jones and Mann, others are not nearly as damaged. I suggest that they were likely specifically targeted by FOIA2009.

While not a direct mention Bishop Hill does get referenced in 1254751382.txt

Note how the likes of Gavin Schmidt are burying themselves with their own responses:

“There’s nothing in the e-mails that shows that global warming is a hoax,” he told Threat Level. “There’s no funding by nefarious groups. There’s no politics in any of these things; nobody from the [United Nations] telling people what to do. There’s nothing hidden, no manipulation."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/climate-hack

It is implausible for Schmidt to have read through the 61MB of, mainly text data, in a day. While he starts with silly strawmen (hoax, nefarious groups) he then goes on to talk about there being "no politics" and "no manipulation", oh dear.

Drs Keith Briffa and Timothy Osborn of your Climatic Research Unit served as lead authors on the IPCC Fourth Assessment, which by international agreement was required to be undertaken on an comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis.1 On 31 March 2008, I asked Dr Briffa for important specific information, not so far released, on his work as a lead author to which I have had no reply or acknowledgement, but have, through other FoI enquiries, been given a copy of his email dated 1 April 2008, to several other IPCC participants including Dr Philip Jones, and to which my letter was attached. He told his colleagues his response to me would be brief when he got round to it. Also included in the documents released to me is an email dated 14 March 2008 to Dr Briffa, among others, from Susan Solomon, Co-Chair of WGI, advising the addressees not to disclose information beyond that (which I consider inadequate) already in the public domain.

Accordingly, I hereby request the following information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and/or the Environmental Information Regulations 2004:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’thave his new email address.We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!CheersPhil

>>> The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical>>> runs with PCM look as though they match observations — but the>>> match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low>>> climate sensitivity — compensating errors. In my (perhaps too>>> harsh)>>> view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model>>> results by individual authors and by IPCC.

You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we've found a way around this."

Bishop: Great summary. The quick summary makes it like one of those old fashioned stack of cards that if you fan them it makes a movie - a horror pick that is tragically funny. The key issues for Jones et al IMHO are the FOIA obstruction and the corruption of the peer review process.

To Bishop Hill: Your Grace, perhaps you could chase up the email where one of the CRU crew says he will only give McIntyre data in a raw and unorganised form. We can use this to test the documents for authenticity. For McIntyre in Climate Audit some time ago complained vigorously over precisely this practice. Unfortunately I cannot get in to Climate Audit to locate McIntyre's complaint - the blog is jammed with callers. Maybe me being in Australia is a factor too. But if you can find the McIntyre complaint in CA about bad data presentation by the hockey stick team, and compare it with the CRU email on the same topic, and the names and dates match up, it would support the authenticity of the documents rather well, methinks.

Moonbat nibbler it is 165mb and I agree reading through it in a day is not possible. There is much in it that smells of corruption. It may not prove AGW is a hoax but has Schimdt charged that all of it is a fabrication? If not he has validated it! This at the very least means their research is unreliable.

Mick Kelly writes asking how to explain recent lack of warming in a public talk. Phil Jones says blame it on La Nina. Kelly says he may also just chop the last few years off the graphic he's preparing.

In case some of our American cousins are unfamiliar with the British penchant for understatement, I should explain that "Mann .....should regress these against something else like the "increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage" he produces" means something like "Mann may look like a testicle but really he's a prick".

Someone needs to pester the right authorities to have the hard drives and servers seized and reconstruct as many deleted e mails as possible. It should be considered as a high level investigation at this point.

I've decided to save the casually curious from the need to download 61MB of stuff, unzip etc. by sticking the emails (with addresses futzed and some phone numbers ditto) on my webserver along with a fairly basic search engine.

Now anyone can search for "M&M" or "FOI" and see everything that shows up - no need to rely on journalists or bloggers potentially selectively quoting emails. Also if you see a quote on a page with a somewhat cryptic reference such as "1103647149" or "1103647149.txt" you can paste the numbers in to the "Open" box and get the file displayed for you.

I'm not thinking straight. It makes far more sense to have password-protection rather than IP-address protection. So, to access those pages

Username: stevePassword: tosser

That is priceless!

By the way, anyone know why most of the headers have been stripped? The txt files (why txt, why not eml?) just have the barest rfc850 headers. There is no Message-Id (which will be added by the mail server) nor References, nor In-Reply-To. I am particularly interested in the Received headers to see the route used. But someone has been very diligent in removing them. I wonder why?

The compliant media are giving cover by spinning the notion the data can’t be relied on because fraudulent data may have been added to the files.The concern these people should have is, who gave sworn testimony and the data shows they lied. I am sure Al Gore would not enjoy the thought of being buggered by a cellmate named Bubba.

Funny how easy it is to grow a conspiracy when one acts politically rather than scientifically. One distortion begets another begets another. Steve McIntyre deserves credit for exposing this conspiracy. His desire to apply the the basic scientific test of replicating results has brought much needed sunlight to this infected industry. The timing could not have been better. Copenhagen should be nice and muted.

McIntyre shows that one person, hard work, and intelligence can make a tremendous difference. He has probably prevented the implementation of regulations that would have cost us trillions of dollars and kept billions mired in poverty. He is Normal Bergland great, but he'll never get a Nobel Peace Prize.

Has anyone begun to think about what recourse the organizations who funded all this research may have, given prima facie evidence of misuse of their funds in order to perpetrate a fraud?

I'm not being hyperbolic, the fraud would include justifying future grants with misleading or false information, so I reall do mean financial fraud, both misusing fiunds already granted, and lying on applications for future funds.

In the USA it's a felony to knowingly make a misstatement to a Federal official in the performance of his duties, 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1001, and this includes applying for and reporting on the work status of grants.http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1001.html

I assume the UK has something similar, plus Hadley may have received US govt funds and is corresponding with recipients of US funds.

It's not enough to just hoot and holler, these people need to be punished and shut down.

Steve McIntyre is a gadfly who will twist any data or communications to maximize his political -- not scientific -- aims. It's no suprise that scientists were incredibly wary of providing him with any ammunition whatsoever for his political crusade.

If you're willing to take stolen, out-of-context personal e-mails presented by the media at face value, I can only hope that the internal communications of the causes you support are also hacked and released to the world at large.

If Steve McIntyre wants to prove something, why doesn't he release an unedited corpus of all his e-mails for the world to review?

After a certain point, Curtis, rational irrationality croses over into insanity. The red herring you offer is not a counter-argument nor an excuse for the crimes commited by Mann, et al. Should the motives of the McIntyres of the world be examined? Yes. Should they be prosecuted for hacking someone else's computer systems? Yes.

However, the facts contained within the emails which have been revealed also reveal malfeance and criminal activities of several sorts and kinds. Such behavior should also be punished with the full authority of the law.

Simple justice requires that if the petty criminal is punished for revealing the greater crime of the master criminals, as you have advocated here, then the master criminals should also be punished more severely for their greater crime.

"Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929) "

I read that one as Cook(as a peer reviewer) asking for Briffa's help to cut down an "ugly" statistical paper that was based on Briffa's own published work, going so far as to point out that Briffa's paper is the "whipping boy".

Cook needs to kill this paper, despite the math being correct, to fall in line with another peer reviewer, whose negative review he already knows about, and because this paper being correct would "harm" the cause.

Some of them are rather interesting, and for science discussion, there is a lot of talk of politics, policy and optics.

This must be followed up with action - I suggest all contact mainstream media with a demand they investigate, verify and report on what is turning out to be the planet's greatest scandal for decades. Suppression of the climate skeptical view by MSM must end. They have been and continue to be complicit in this conspiracy.

If so much money (trillions) is being considered by self-serving governments in the form of cap and trade and international treaties, etc., I by nature must be skeptical.

Before that albatross is hung, there had better be crystal clear transparency as to the threat and what causes it. Humanity cannot afford to get this wrong. At this point, no one has offered any PROOF, and the power brokers who have presented the most compelling EVIDENCE to date have just lost credibility in the iPublic.

I sense a backlash of unprecedented proportion is swelling, because these very same power brokers brought the world to the brink of accepting the albatross, as if we had no choice, when in reality the science is not only unsettled, it is frankly unknowable with today's technology. As this scandal spreads,I think the average person will not be very happy about this deception.